"custom Inori skin"????

relo??

Sorry mate, I use relo for a relocation record (when dredging object files for linker or compiler bugs). For my cuzzies and sis and the like I say "rellie," as does everyone else around here. But you're right that the arvo comes by every day.

Hmm, quick rummage and a bit of google-fu shows that Lester Haines was the Register hack who once thought we call a tarpaulin a "tarpo".

I suggest The Register give him six months' transportation to Australia. He can spend a nice traditional chrissie on the beach with some sheilas and go back and tell the poms what's what. And miss a horrible UK winter.

How long are you talking exactly?

Is this "AD" some new EU-mandated metric unit? Dekka-Amperes (presumably 10^30 Amps) perhaps? Long enough for 5000 Active Directory installations to lock up (a rather short period I would say)? Or perhaps it's the lifetimes of 5000 Denying Apologists (as in climate change Denying oil company Apologists)?

Oh, the disappointment

Dont' go overboard; hardly the first general purpose language

He was a titan, but don't go overboard: "General-purpose programming languages had not existed before C" is rubbish: Algol, and Fortran preceded it by more than a decade, and Multics (which dmr worked on) was written in PL/1 as were its applications.

C was / is a good implementation of the idea, based on learning from those experiences, as dmr himself would say.

In other words: there's no need to denigrate the giants upon whose shoulders he stood.

"mistreatment of the host???"

essentially: no

More people can dabble, which is your point. This is like more people painting pictures at the local arts program. The pictures are crap but they have fun and they have something of their own to hang on the wall.

You also ignored the huge number of "business process" "applications" which aren't really any more creative than writing a memo.

Making something creative that changes lots of peoples' lives is hard work and hasn't changed significantly over the past 25 years, whether you're programming a major, scalable web application (e.g. facebook, google) or an embedded app (e.g. ipod). Those still take creative work once the prototype is done.

Ah, the TWO horsemen of the Infocalypse

Only paedos and Terr'ists? I guess that's just 'coz it's a simple embedded device. Were it a full-featured user device then we'd get Drugs and Organised Crime too, and then you'd have to register before using one.

Hey, that wouldn't be so bad. ASIO could monitor your caffeine consumption and see if your cardiac problems are due to excess consumption? If so Medicare won't have to pay. Taxpayers would be thrilled! And what about children drinking coffee?

Skull-n-crossbones because in the future only hackers 'n pirates will use unlicensed coffee machines.

I can believe it

At first I also agreed it looked fake because everybody pretty much just stood around and watched. But he was so incompetent: wandering around, taking several flabby kicks to remove a panel which then came imperfectly free, slipping on the desk because of leather shoes, etc. A hollywood epic would have had more planning and would have had attractive debris flying clear. It is convincing to me.

All joking aside

Generally embedded hardware comes with an availability guarantee (i.e. the vendor has to keep making the same chip for you even if the state of the art has moved on). When you buy a company you can't just throw its contracts away. So Apple has to do this even if they toss PA Semi's business away -- they can just refuse to sign any new contracts to supply chips. Whether this has to do with the DoD or anybody else is no big deal.

So sorry, this isn't really news. The only real complicated question is why I would bother to read an article about something I don't think is news...

Thanks, I already know the "pleasure" of Buffalo gear

Having had a poor experience with their gear in the past, we nevertheless in desperation last year bought a buffalo NAS just to tide ourselves over for a couple of weeks until the real gear arrived. Wow, what a mistake. Even the nontechnical staff joined us in throwing it off the roof.

Which I might mercifully have forgotten had their name not come up this week...when someone complained to me that none of their buffalo gear was reliable.

dearie me

The great Green rush

I like that at the end of this message (and just above the comments) I got the ad, "What's your take on the great Green rush? Join the debate here." So are we to colonise Mars and massacre all the little Green men?

Right, then, first plan should be that upon landing we burn the ships. Oh and bring some blankies of smallpox. Let's see, what's next...

Find the cheapest price for Winston Churchills in your area...

you need some links yourselves

oh, and though you had a couple of links to ludicrous wikipedia entries (perhaps changed by now) you didn't even provide a link to what she actually said. Which is rather her point.

Speaking of links, I'm impressed by what you got from Google. Please provide the search string. When I typed "what do you think about the ban of google in brighton" and clicked on "submit" what I got was nothing like "We believe that more knowledge is more power..."

Uhh....what' sthe point?

Who needs a $3K, 4TB iSCSI implementation when you can get an inexpensive NAS RAID for about the same price?

I can see it...sort of...at the higher levels, but the "S" setup seems like horrible overkill for the alleged market: people who won't grow much (e.g. the proverbial dentists) and who need as few moving parts as possible.

yeah yeah, old news

There have been many examples of programing languages with kewords in different languages; French Algol is only one. The issue of keyword homonyms due to unicode keyspace was also extensively discussed in the unicode world years ago.

But the fact is that it's no more alien for a non-English speaker to use "<font>" or "for (i=0; i<x; i++);" than it is for an English speaker to use "Allegro" or "Da Capo a la Fine." Or eat camembert or sushi. Or even say "OK".

People world wide understand all of these "technical" and "alien" terms. What's the big deal?

mash-up is so lame

(I swear it's true: when I got to the bottom of the article it said there were..._*17*_ comments....).

The mash-up is merely a one-way Conversation with the MLM and megacorps. The true crowdsourced pleaser is the Sarnie (TM), the RSS Feed that keeps you in touch with your friend's movements. This FriendTwitter (which we call "Fritter") is your own high-degree personalised data "mix tape" of financial records, mp3s, indescreet acts and peculiar purchases. Upon it is laid the crowdsourced Titter of your community -- that's the Conversation -- while your Fritter rests upon the mass media (for that's where the bread is). This PersonalStack is truly Delicous. It's a high-cholesterol Rich Multimedia experience. Today's consumer doesn't want the same experience as everyone else, today's consumer makes their own Younique life-mix, and the Sarnie ties it all together in an easily-handled personal way that is naturally part of the daily rituals. It's what you've been waiting for, and it's online for you.

So then what did he do?

any startups still use desk phones?

We have an 8-person startup using only mobiles (with one VOIP "main" number that we practically never answer but just check messages).

Since we're still in development we don't have any customers to satisfy; most callers (basically investors and vendors) just call someone directly. We do use the main line for the conference phone.

If we were at the customer stage then it would be different. Even now, since we're in the USA, coverage isn't great so sometimes we miss a cleaner line.

We pick up peoples' phone bill of course. Because we're relatively small we don't qualify for any special rate anyway so we just pay for whatever plan the person has (unless they have the million unit plan, but nobody so far does).

I know of plenty of other startups that are using the same approach.

The one issue is changing personnel. If we give out somene's mobile #, once they leave we're screwed. We haven't found a good solution to that. Fine, we could give out an external number and forward the call from the outside to a mobile via VOIP, but a call back from the mobile will show the mobile's caller ID. For now we solve that problem by sticking together, but again, that's an apprach that doesn't scale.

Seems like there's an opportunity for someone to make a good business from this...

Hey -- want more than just a press release

Hey, I was hoping for more than just a press release. Worse, a press release on a stupid product that nobody seems to want (OK, I have actually seen a grand total of... ONE ... of these things in the wild). I thought some snarky remarks about battery-powered bricks or even a sympathetic comment. But if I'd known there would be no commenttary I wouldn't have bothered to read the page.